by Alan Keslian
‘Come on now, don’t block the door, let the man through.’ They inched apart slightly, making room for me to squeeze between them. The whole group followed me into the next room, the sound of their voices ever louder as we progressed. One of them picked up a wrapped condom from the glass shelf above the wash-basin and asked, ‘How did you know what size to get us?’
The redhead answered for me: ‘Worried it’ll be too big for you?’
‘Too small!’
‘All talk!’
When they had seen the three double rooms they argued about who was to share with whom. As rude accusations about personal habits echoed around the floor I put the keys in the doors and turned to go downstairs. Darren was coming up towards me. ‘Sounds like a coach party,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ We could hear the Geordies hauling their bags around, presumably having decided who was to sleep where.
‘I’m not working tomorrow evening or Sunday afternoon. I could help out, if there’s anything you want doing.’
‘Let’s see how it goes.’ He climbed past me onto the landing, where one of the Geordies spotted him and signalled to the others. Suddenly silent they emerged from their rooms to watch his skinny figure climb up the next flight of stairs. ‘Where on earth did you get that?’ the redhead asked, his blue eyes open wide.
‘He helps out here, with the gardens mostly. Sorry, you won’t be seeing much of him, he has a full-time job in a burger bar.’
‘Never mind his work, I think I’ll follow him up. There’s plenty I could do for him right now.’
‘The top floor where he lives is strictly out of bounds.’
He looked at me questioningly. ‘There’s no signs saying private or staff only.’
‘No, there are no signs, I prefer to tell people personally that the top floor is out of bounds.’
‘Do you live up there with him?’
‘I’m not sure what it has to do with you, but no, I’m in the basement flat.’ When I continued on my way downstairs he called after me, ‘One thing before you go, pet, if you’re feeling a bit lonely during the night or finding it difficult to sleep, just come up and knock at any of our doors, you’ll be made very welcome I can assure you.’
‘Thanks, I didn’t realise I looked that desperate.’
‘I saw it as soon as I set eyes on you, man.’
‘You won’t be out clubbing at night then?’
‘You’re right there. You might do better giving us a knock during the day.’
Looking as uninterested as possible I said drearily, ‘Thanks so much for the invitation.’
‘Well take advantage of it, man, and I’m not just saying that to get you to take something off the bill.’
On their way out that evening they found me in the hotel’s little office under the ground floor staircase and asked for directions to a club popular with men from South-East Asia. They were particularly keen on Chinese men, referring to them as continentals as a kind of joke, having overheard someone in a bar use the word by mistake instead of orientals.
‘Do you get many Chinese or Japanese coming to the hotel?’
‘No, not so far. Perhaps I’m not advertising in the right places.’
‘A house like this full of Chinese boys would be paradise. They have such lovely oval eyes and soft smooth golden skin. You won’t find anything more lovely to touch. Why go all the way to Hong Kong or Thailand when you can pick up what you want here in London?’ The group had been coming to London for years for what they unashamedly called ‘dirty weekends’. The redhead had once lived-in as a trainee chef with one of the big hotel chains ‘down south’, actually in Stevenage. On his days off he and a gay friend used to travel to London, stay out all night at the clubs and take the first train back in the morning. Eventually he returned to Newcastle to work in the students’ restaurant at the city’s university.
They asked me about eating locally, and ruled out the nearby curry house, recalling a previous time when the effects of Vindaloo and pints of lager had ruined their hopes of picking up continentals that night. I mentioned that the Thai restaurant had a couple of very attractive waiters, warning that some of the food was extremely hot, and they decided to try there.
My plans for the evening were to eat a take-away meal that Tom would bring in and, if the hotel was quiet enough, to escape the premises by going to the Beckford Arms for an hour or so. We were seeing much more of each other than when I was living in Chiswick, but the established pattern of spending Friday, Saturday, and Wednesday nights together continued. Sunday lunch with Andrew was now always at the hotel. We had briefly discussed the possibility of Tom moving in with me, but both of us were used to our independence and were afraid that being constantly together from necessity might be bad for us.
With the hotel full, leaving it unattended for over an hour to go to the Beckford Arms was a little risky, but most of the guests had gone out for the evening and were likely to return late. All had keys to the front door, the No Vacancies signs on either side of the ground floor bay window would put off anyone who might pass by looking for a room, and a notice on the office door gave my mobile ’phone number in case of an emergency.
To my annoyance when we returned from the pub we found a note on the hall table asking for two full breakfasts to be taken up to a first floor room in the morning. The two men who had taken it had public school accents, were very well dressed, and were probably accustomed to larger hotels staffed to provide room service. They had not asked about having breakfast in their room when I told them that breakfast on Saturdays was between eight and ten-thirty in the breakfast room. Leaving me a note like that was presumptuous. Tom suggested taking them up a couple of bowls of lukewarm porridge with skin forming around the edge, but I wrote a polite refusal on the foot of their message explaining that there were insufficient staff to serve breakfast in the rooms and pushed it under their door.
The next morning Tom woke me as he climbed out of bed, his stronger build as usual causing the mattress to quake underneath me. The time was twenty past seven, and unable to lie in bed at weekends as I used to in Chiswick, my best hope was to steal another fifteen minutes’ sleep as he dressed and went up to make coffee for us in the hotel kitchen.
My snooze was short-lived. When he opened the door at the top of the stairs a loud Geordie voice reverberated down from the dining room: ‘Have you been having a lie-in, pet, we’ve been waiting here for half an hour?’ The words penetrated my semi-conscious mind, and, worried about leaving Tom to cope, I got out of bed and dressed. Of all the people at the hotel, the Geordies were the last I would have expected to be in the breakfast room first thing on Saturday morning. Upstairs, sprawling over half the tables, I found my six Newcastle guests with four strangers, three of them decidedly Chinese or South-East Asian. ‘There’s our man,’ said the redhead, ‘things’ll get moving now.’
‘Breakfast is not until eight on Saturday, it says so on the back of the door to your room.’
‘We’ve not long got in. We brought a few lads back from the club, we’d like to buy them breakfast too, or we can share out what you’ve got for us if that’s a bit awkward, just let us have some extra cups of tea or coffee.’
‘If you want extra breakfasts you’re welcome to have them, the menu tells you what they cost. I’ll put out fruit juice and breakfast cereal and you can make a start with that, but if you want cooked breakfasts you’ll have to wait half an hour.’
‘We’re starving hungry, pet – but we’ve all day, there’s no hurry. You carry on in your usual business, we don’t want to put you out.’
By the time the cook came in at quarter to eight Tom had taken them pots of tea and coffee, and I had started mushrooms, sausages and bacon cooking on the stove. Darren looked in at the kitchen as usual to let me know he was going off to work. When he passed the door of the dining room on his way out I heard the red-haired Geordie waylay him: ‘Well now, you’re not being sent off in the morning with no breakfast, surely. We�
�ve a cup of tea or coffee for you here, come and sit down next to me.’
‘No thanks, I’m in a hurry, going to work. I have coffee and a bacon roll there.’
‘It’s a great shame, you having to rush off at this hour on a Saturday morning. Tell you what, if you fancy a bit of a night out tonight, you could come to this terrific club with us. Plenty of lads your age go. There’ll be a stripper. You’ll enjoy yourself no end.’
‘I’m not sure… ’
‘Well see how you’re fixed. We’re up on the second floor, or if you’re passing the lounge about six or seven we’ll likely be in there. A lad like you ought to enjoy a bit of life on a Saturday night.’
Having devoured their full English breakfasts, the Geordies and their friends all retired to the three second floor rooms. On their way up they encountered the two men who had requested room service making their way down. The staircase to the first floor is much wider than those above, and the Geordies, pulling the continentals into line and moving to the sides of the steps made a narrow corridor for the two men to pass through, trying to play the same trick they had played on me when they forced me to squeeze through them as they crowded the doorways to their rooms. ‘Come through now, don’t let us hold you up,’ the redhead called.
‘No, you’re the majority, you come up first, please.’ Wisely the two men from room four resisted the invitation and backed away from the ten-man gauntlet waiting on the stairs.
I shouted from the hall, ‘Either go up or come down, you’ll cause an accident, fooling around like that on the stairs.’ They yielded and resumed their way up.
I apologised to the two men for the obstruction, showed them to a freshly laid table in the dining room, and said I hoped they weren’t offended by my note about not providing room service. ‘We would have quite liked to have taken breakfast in bed, but we quite understand,’ was the slightly cool reply.
In the afternoon at about four o’clock one of the Geordies, a brown haired man I had not heard speak before, reappeared in the hall, unshaven, dark shadows under his eyes, having quickly pulled on a T-shirt and trousers. ‘We’ve run out of tea things. Could you let us have a few extras?’
All the rooms have their own tea and coffee making equipment. I gave him a tray with extra supplies, including sachets of coffee and China and Indian tea bags, four extra cups and some biscuits. ‘Your visitors, they look to me like orientals, not continentals.’
‘Don’t be silly, man. We’re all oriented the same way, that’s why we’re staying in a gay hotel.’
‘What about cleaning your rooms?’
‘Don’t worry about that; where we come from we only make the beds at Christmas and Bank Holidays. You don’t really need to when you sleep in your clothes.’
‘You might like to mention to the others that if you want dinner tomorrow it’s served from two o’clock. You’ll probably eat on the train or when you reach home, but if you do want the meal you need to tell me tonight.’
Their next appearance was well after six in the evening, when they met in the lounge to plan the night’s activities, their loud voices audible everywhere on the ground floor. I went up to empty their waste bins and hastily tidied their rooms. Darren came looking for me to say that he would not be joining Tom and me in the Beckford Arms that night.
‘You’re not going out with them are you?’
‘They’re going for a meal first, but I’m meeting them afterwards to go to this club with them.’
‘Be careful. They’ll have your trousers down.’
He pulled his tongue out at me. ‘No they won’t. They like Chinese boys.’
Knowing that their taste was not as specific as he thought I tackled the redhead in the hall before they left: ‘Darren tells me you’re taking him to a club. He’s very young. Are you sure he’s going to be all right?’
‘This is a more of a social type of club, not the sort of place where they’re ripping each other’s clothes off. You can’t expect to keep a boy like that tied to your apron strings, pet. Don’t you fret now, the lads know your boy’s not on the menu. No man, it’s the continental lads in the club that need to worry; some of them can expect to be making close acquaintance with Newcastle private parts tonight.’
I cooked a prawn, mushroom, and vegetable stir-fry for dinner for Tom and myself. He had worked all day installing new bathroom fittings in a nearby flat; I had not been out once. We were both too tired for the Beckford Arms and spent the evening watching television. My last chore was to take out the food needed for Sunday dinner from the freezer to defrost overnight.
In the morning as soon Tom began to move I got out of bed and dressed. We went upstairs together and found three of the Newcastle group in the dining room, sprawling on their chairs reading Sunday papers. ‘Are the others still out partying?’
‘No, they’ve gone up to bed. They don’t have our stamina. Two of them are Mackem boys anyhow. You don’t expect Mackems to keep up with Geordies.’
‘Two of them are what?’
‘Mackem boys, it’s a Geordie expression for someone from Sunderland. Have you never been outside London, man? Even people from Durham know that.’
‘No orientals this morning?’
‘Oh there were continentals last night all right. I met this beautiful Chinese boy from Hong Kong, he was a real golden boy in every sense of the word. I wish I could take him back up north with me. A couple of nights in the London clubs leaves you a bit tired, mind; I don’t know how people living down here cope with it, all the activity night after night.’
Tom, not having entirely grasped the humour intended by their use of the word continental, said, ‘Mark’s already told you, a Chinese boy is an oriental, not a continental.’
‘Ah – and if he’s an oriental, what does that make me, an occidental?’
Not understanding, Tom shrugged and pulled a face. ‘What d’you mean, doesn’t make you anything, does it?’
‘I’m no accidental, my parents intended me, I was planned.’
‘What about Darren?’ I asked. ‘Did he get back all right?’
‘He was having a great time. He’s got a lovely way of moving his limbs around, that boy, last we saw he was dancing with someone. They probably left together.’
‘You took him to the club; you should have made sure he got home safe,’ Tom said, irritated.
‘He was enjoying himself. We weren’t going to spoil his chances. What are you, his godfather?’
‘If he’d been with me I’d have took proper care of him.’
‘Well take him to the club yourself next time then.’
We assumed Darren had returned during the night and gone safely up to bed. After giving them breakfast we ate our own lighter meal in the kitchen. They finished and went up to their rooms long before anyone else came down. The well spoken couple from room four came down at the latest possible moment, a heavy fug from over indulgence the night before robbing them of their customary polished manners. They knocked a full glass of orange juice over the table, lamely trying to dab the spillage with serviettes until I brought them a clean table cloth.
Sundays can be tiring because clearing away after breakfast can take until eleven, leaving only a couple of hours free before preparations begin for the main meal of the day in the afternoon. With the cook and a part-time waiter hired in for the afternoon, the main meal was just manageable. I helped out as needed, showing people to their tables and going round later to ask if the food was all right. Tom, Andrew, and – when he was not at the burger bar – Darren, sat down with me to eat at what we called our ‘family table’.
That day Tom was working in the morning because he wanted to finish off tiling a bathroom wall. He went home to change out of his working clothes and collected Andrew from Biddulph Mansions. At one o’clock I rang Darren’s room but got no answer. If he was not back in time for dinner Andrew was sure to ask what had happened to him. Half an hour later, puzzled more than worried, I went up to check, letting myself in
with my pass key. Everything in the room was tidy, the bed made and the curtains open, the only evidence of life coming from the terrapins. I gave them a little food from the tub next to the tank and watched them paddle around excitedly in their few inches of water.
Downstairs the smell of meat roasting in the ovens permeated the ground floor, while the cook could be heard chopping vegetables in the kitchen. The waiter was laying tables with fresh linen and cutlery from the big corner cupboard, attractive in his white shirt and tight black jeans.
From the little office where I was preparing bills for guests who were leaving that afternoon I heard Andrew and Tom talking in the hall, and stepped out to see an other-worldly looking Andrew, his white hair glowing in bright light from the open door behind him. In his arms he held an enormous flowering plant in a brass container; peering through the foliage he said, ‘I was thinking of putting this on the hall table. Have you a cloth or a mat of some sort to put under it?’
A couple of transparent plastic file wallets from the office were the nearest things to hand. ‘It’s a beautiful plant. What is it?’
‘A phalaenopsis, a type of orchid.’ Above the vigorous green plume of leaves rose seven or eight flower stems, each displaying more than half a dozen butterfly-like blooms, the outer parts of the flowers paper white, the middles patterned with rich purple spots deepening towards the centre. ‘I hope it won’t be in the way,’ he said modestly.
‘It’s wonderful.’
Tom straightened one of the leaves which had become creased up against the wall. ‘Perhaps I should rig up a little shelf or bracket for it somewhere.’
‘Are you lending it to me?’
‘If it won’t be in your way. The blooms will last a few weeks with any luck, I’ll take it back to the nursery once they fade.’ He rocked the container from side to side to test its stability, then pinned the leaf Tom had straightened out to the notice board with a drawing pin. ‘I expect it will be all right like that while we eat.’
The dining room was filling up and we went in and sat at our table. When the first course arrived, as expected Andrew commented on Darren’s absence: ‘Darren not joining us today?’